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His fingers trail over petals, like a connaisseur dealing in silks.
“Too common,” he mutters at a rose, stolen in the dead of night from a balcony of a pining girl. “Overrated, entirely.”
“A hint of nothing, I see,” he snarls at the daisy, gifted freely from an aunt once held dear before she began to smell of feather-rot.
“Oh,” he whispers, feeling the curl of the gladiola’s stem, the sheer weight of emotion curled in each flower tempting him sweetly. This had been a tithe paid by his new neighbour (a brutish creature of flesh, of muscle, of bog and toil). Each flower held a wonderous assortment of talande: red for heartbreak, orange for determination, yellow for fear, green for healing, blue for happiness, and purple for intrigue. This single tithe could feed him for the next four months.
But he knew himself. He knew his greed. His hand moved to a quill made of woven mothwing scales, dipping in ink of human blood.
“O’ neighbour mine,” he wrote in curling cursive. “O’ Luka of the Fairge…”